an important aspect of Pomodoro at a corporate gig is not “how long can i remain attentive” but “how long is it acceptable to be unreachable for”. it’s about guaranteeing yourself an uninterrupted chunk of time, by disabling slack/email/etc. as long as you’re doing vaguely productive things for that time slot, you’ve already unlocked most of the benefits.
for truly personal work, i mostly don’t use Pomodoro timers, and go for a more freeform approach: once i feel myself slowing down, i’ll set down my work, take a break, and then pick a different thing off my to-do list. the exception is for tasks that i have trouble getting started on. say, a book whose opening isn’t hooking me. i’ll set a timer promising to do the activity for 15 minutes. during those minutes, i free myself from thinking about the meta picture of “is this the right task to be working on” and can properly focus on getting into the book. when the alarm goes off, only then do i reconsider my priorities, and either keep at the task without the timer, or put it down.
in the end, maybe it’s just about being aware/explicit with your time. no timer is going to force you into flow. but it will force you to think more critically about your time.
Thanks. Re your second paragraph, this seems somewhat similar to jimrandomh’s comment above, viz. pomodoros are for work and breaks can be used to evaluate work. Also I think you’re saying that it’s OK to do 1 pomodoro on something even if it’s not obviously worthwhile—which makes some sense as evaluating the usefulness costs time. (Cf in Getting Things Done, almost anything that can be done in 2 minutes should be done straight away (if it’s not obviously not worth doing), to avoid this overhead.)
an important aspect of Pomodoro at a corporate gig is not “how long can i remain attentive” but “how long is it acceptable to be unreachable for”. it’s about guaranteeing yourself an uninterrupted chunk of time, by disabling slack/email/etc. as long as you’re doing vaguely productive things for that time slot, you’ve already unlocked most of the benefits.
for truly personal work, i mostly don’t use Pomodoro timers, and go for a more freeform approach: once i feel myself slowing down, i’ll set down my work, take a break, and then pick a different thing off my to-do list. the exception is for tasks that i have trouble getting started on. say, a book whose opening isn’t hooking me. i’ll set a timer promising to do the activity for 15 minutes. during those minutes, i free myself from thinking about the meta picture of “is this the right task to be working on” and can properly focus on getting into the book. when the alarm goes off, only then do i reconsider my priorities, and either keep at the task without the timer, or put it down.
in the end, maybe it’s just about being aware/explicit with your time. no timer is going to force you into flow. but it will force you to think more critically about your time.
Thanks. Re your second paragraph, this seems somewhat similar to jimrandomh’s comment above, viz. pomodoros are for work and breaks can be used to evaluate work. Also I think you’re saying that it’s OK to do 1 pomodoro on something even if it’s not obviously worthwhile—which makes some sense as evaluating the usefulness costs time. (Cf in Getting Things Done, almost anything that can be done in 2 minutes should be done straight away (if it’s not obviously not worth doing), to avoid this overhead.)